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    A new way to solve paradoxes can help you think more clearly

    By Margaret Cuonzo

    A WOMAN once approached me with a curious problem concerning her husband. Like most people who choose to get married, she had promised to love her spouse to the exclusion of all others. But there was a problem: according to her, the man she married simply wasn’t the same person any more. He had the same name and career, the same memories and skills. But over many years, an accumulation of small changes had, she felt, made her husband a completely different person.
    This woman had approached me not because I’m an expert in matters of the heart, but because I had just given a talk about paradoxes. These puzzles have entertained and perplexed us for millennia. They force us to grapple with some of the deepest matters of logic and meaning. What does it mean for something to be “the same”, for instance?
    I couldn’t offer the woman any simple answers. I reminded her that she had probably changed quite a bit since her youth too. And I pointed out that sometimes our intuitions about concepts like identity can be unhelpful.
    In fact, the point goes well beyond relationships. Chewing over paradoxes can show us places where our intuitions need tweaking, and this applies everywhere from the foundations of mathematics to social media and our efforts to live more sustainable lives. Paradoxes have helped thinkers resculpt our understanding of key concepts and attain fresh scientific insights time and again. Now, a new way of thinking through paradoxes is emerging, one that holds promise because it puts our mushy human intuition front and centre.
    One reasonable way … More

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    Jurassic World Evolution 2 review: Let the dinosaurs unleash chaos

    By Jacob Aron

    You can run a safe theme park. Or you can unleash chaos. Which is more fun?Frontier Developments
    Game
    Jurassic World Evolution 2
    Frontier DevelopmentsAdvertisement

    THE original Jurassic Park was released in 1993, and as a dinosaur-obsessed 7-year-old, I simply had to see it. I badgered my parents to take me, even though I was probably a bit too young to watch people being eaten by monsters.
    Needless to say, I loved it, and have had a soft spot for both the books and films ever since. So I jumped at the chance to make my own dinosaur park in Jurassic World Evolution 2.
    The game adds dinosaurs to the template of classic management sims such as Theme Park or RollerCoaster Tycoon. You begin after the events of the fifth film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, when dinosaurs were released en masse into the wild. Your job, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to round them up. This teaches you the basics of building enclosures, looking after dinosaurs and so on, but it isn’t particularly exciting.
    Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard voice their characters from the films and offer advice, but it seems the developers couldn’t secure Chris Pratt, so settled for a substitute that sounds nothing like him.
    While the campaign serves as a useful tutorial, where the game really shines is in Chaos Theory mode. This puts you in charge of parks from the five films to see if you can avoid disaster, and is much more fun. In the era of the first film, dinosaurs don’t exist yet, so you send scientists out to find fossils and extract their DNA.
    “I hatched two T. rex. They began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped”
    I started with velociraptors, or at least the Jurassic Park versions, which are roughly as big as a human – the real thing was turkey-sized and had feathers. Despite this inaccuracy, it was a thrill to release them into their enclosure, ready for paying guests. “Every precaution has been taken, we’re following the science,” said one of the researchers, in what feels like a knowing wink to the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic – Frontier Developments is based in Cambridge, UK.
    Keeping your park going involves balancing science, business, entertainment and logistics. You need a steady stream of research to create new dinosaurs and modify their DNA, but that requires a positive cash flow. Guests are your main revenue source, but they don’t only want dinosaurs: you have to build restaurants, hotels and toilets to keep them happy. Then there is the back end of the park – power stations, park rangers and medical teams – which supports everything else.
    With all this to keep track of, it is no wonder that John Hammond’s original Jurassic Park was a disaster. I managed to hold things together, just. There is a fun moment when Hammond echoes the “we have a T. rex?” line from the original film, which he asks with a mixture of glee and surprise as you prepare to unleash one.
    I actually hatched not one T. rex but two and plopped them down in an enclosure I had built to house them as the pride of the park. Unfortunately, I didn’t give them enough food and they began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped. It was a scary moment, until I realised I could simply dispatch a helicopter to tranquilise it and ferry it back to the enclosure.
    That moment highlights a tension that the game doesn’t quite manage to solve – you want your park to run smoothly, but to really recreate the atmosphere of Jurassic Park, you want to unleash chaos.
    Jacob also recommends…

    Games
    Jurassic Park
    Ocean Software
    NES and Nintendo GameBoy

    Planet Zoo
    Frontier Developments
    PC

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    Winter is purple spouting broccoli's time to shine

    By Clare Wilson
    GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
    IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
    This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
    Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

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    Winter is purple sprouting broccoli's time to shine

    By Clare Wilson
    GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
    IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
    This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
    Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

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    Two stars’ close encounter may explain a cosmic flare that has barely faded

    A newborn star whizzing past another stellar youngster triggered a cosmic flare-up that began nearly a century ago and is still going strong today, researchers say.

    In late 1936, a dim star in the constellation Orion started to erupt in our sky and soon shone over 100 times as brightly as it had before. Only telescopes could detect the star prior to the outburst, but afterward, the star was so bright it was visible through binoculars. The star even lit up part of the previously dark interstellar cloud called Barnard 35 that presumably gave the star birth (SN: 1/10/76).

    Amazingly, the star, now named FU Orionis, is still shining almost as brightly today, 85 years later. That means the star wasn’t a nova, a stellar explosion that quickly fades from view (SN: 2/12/21). But the exact cause of the long-lasting flare-up has been a mystery.

    Now, computer simulations may offer a clue to what’s kept the celestial beacon shining so brightly. Located about 1,330 light-years from Earth, FU Orionis is actually a double star, consisting of two separate stars that probably orbit each other. One is about as massive as the sun, while the other is only 30 percent to 60 percent as massive. Because the stars are so young, each has a disk of gas and dust revolving around it. It’s the lesser star’s passage through the other star’s disk that triggered and sustains the great flare-up, the simulations suggest.

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    “The low-mass star is the one that is in outburst,” says Elisabeth Borchert, an astrophysicist at Monash University in Clayton, Australia.

    According to Borchert’s team, the outburst arose as the low-mass star passed 10 to 20 times as far from its mate as the Earth is from the sun — comparable to the distance between the sun and Saturn or Uranus. As the lesser star plowed through the other star’s disk, gas and dust from that disk rained down onto the intruder. In the simulations, this material got hot and glowed profusely, making the low-mass star hundreds of times brighter, behavior that mimicked FU Orionis’ outburst.

    The flare-up has endured so long because the gravitational pull of the lesser star captured material that began to orbit the star and is still falling onto it, the researchers explain in a paper submitted online November 24 at arXiv.org. The study will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    “It is a plausible explanation,” says Scott Kenyon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved with the study. The researchers “get a rise in luminosity about what the observations show,” he says, and “it lasts a long time.”

    Kenyon says one way to test the team’s theory is to track how the two stars move relative to each other in the future. That may reveal whether the stars were as close together in 1936 as the simulations suggest. Astronomers discovered the binary nature of FU Orionis only two decades ago, by which time the stars were much farther apart in their elliptical orbit around each other.

    Since the discovery of FU Orionis, several other newborn stars have flared up in a similar fashion. The binary model “could be a good explanation for all of them,” Borchert says, if those stars also have stellar companions that recently skirted past. More

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    The best sci-fi TV shows and movies to look forward to in 2022

    By Swapna Krishna
    James Dimmock/CBS
    The best films and TV
    Towards the end of 2021, a glut of movies and shows that had been delayed by covid-19 finally hit the screens. Next year, that trend continues with a plethora of sci-fi offerings.
    Paramount Plus (which is due to launch in the UK in 2022) has a double treat for fans of the Star Trek franchise. Patrick Stewart stars in a new series of Star Trek: Picard, which returns in early 2022. Later in the year, the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will bring back fan favourites such as Spock, Uhura and Number One.
    Over in the Star Wars universe, Obi-Wan Kenobi starring Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen will premiere on Disney+. The streaming service will also bring back Diego Luna as Cassian Andor from Rogue One in Andor.Advertisement
    Back on Paramount Plus, a new show, Halo, based on the hit video game series, will also be released in early 2022. Set in the 26th century, it will focus on a war between humans and aliens, with Pablo Schreiber set to play the legendary Master Chief.
    From Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, comes a new high-concept series for Amazon Prime Video called The Peripheral, based on a book by William Gibson. It focuses on a detective (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) who believes that she witnessed a murder in cyberspace.
    On the big screen, the threats are more tangible. February sees the release of Moonfall, in which Halle Berry stars as a NASA executive and former astronaut who must take action when the moon breaks its orbit and is set to collide with Earth.
    Space thriller 65 is set for release in April. Few details have been released, except that the main character, played by Adam Driver, arrives on another planet to discover he isn’t alone.
    On a lighter note, Disney Pixar’s Lightyear comes to cinemas in June. Set in the Toy Story universe, it traces the origins of Buzz Lightyear — the “real” astronaut that was immortalised as a children’s toy in the cartoons.
    It is also a big year for long-awaited sequels. Avatar 2 finally arrives at the end of the year, more than 10 years after James Cameron introduced us to the world of Pandora. And Jurassic World: Dominion will roar onto big screens in June for one last adventure starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.
    Whatever else this year brings, we certainly won’t be short of entertainment.

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    Our pick of the best sci-fi and speculative fiction books for 2022

    By Sally Adee

    The Unfamiliar Garden / The Sky Vault
    Benjamin Percy
    Hodder & StoughtonAdvertisement
    Not one but two sequels to The Ninth Metal come out this year. A comet peppers Earth with a new metallic super-ore whose discovery changes everything. Out in January and August, respectively.

    Goliath: A novel
    Tochi Onyebuchi
    Tordotcom
    In the 2050s, space colonies offer refuge from a collapsing climate, but only for the rich. The rest have to figure out how to live in it. Out in January.

    Mickey7
    Edward Ashton
    St Martin’s Press
    Mickey7 is a disposable human who is sent to colonise dangerous new worlds, a job he is suited for because he can regenerate. After being lost, presumed dead, he meets his successor and they must team up to survive. Out in February.

    The This
    Adam Roberts
    Gollancz
    In the dystopian near future, smartphones have become sex toys and the hottest new social media platform grows directly into your brain. What could possibly go wrong? Out in February.

    The Cartographers
    Peng Shepherd
    Hachette
    In this dark fable, a young woman finds a strange map among her estranged father’s things after his untimely death. Deadly secrets and gothic-inflected speculative fiction ensue. Out in March.

    Plutoshine
    Lucy Kissick
    Orion 
    Lucy Kissick is a nuclear scientist with a PhD in planetary geochemistry. Her book about terraforming Pluto – even as native alien species are discovered – may put you in mind of Kim Stanley Robinson. Out in April.

    Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak
    Charlie Jane Anders (Titan)
    Teenage geniuses in space. Book two of a fun, rompy, LGBTQ+ space opera series that blurs the line between young adult and science fiction. Out in April.

    Eversion
    Alastair Reynolds
    Gollancz
    Airships, steampunk, a mysterious artefact and expeditions that keep going wrong. It’s up to Dr Silas Coade to figure out why. Out in May.

    Glitterati
    Oliver Langmead
    Titan
    An influencer comedy of horrors billed as A Clockwork Orange meets RuPaul’s Drag Race. The fun kicks off when nosebleeds become a fashion trend – and it sparks a vicious fight for credit. Out in May.

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    Do all Australian critters glow green under UV light, or is it borax?

    Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

    Humans

    29 December 2021

    Josie Ford
    Glowing reports
    Happy new year, happy new year – may we all have a vision, now and then, of a world where every neighbour is a friend! You catch us having our annual bath, singing along to ABBA’s traditional Swedish seasonal carol and possibly still feeling the effects of one too many Tío Pepes. Well, what do you expect in a column dated 1 January?
    We are put in a particularly good mood, however, by Tony Powers, who writes with a follow-up to an article last year about platypuses, those remarkable mammals that glow in UV light, produce venom and … More